Talk:Diana Johnstone

Question!

Hello, Philip Cross! Why are you eager to include Cohen's polemical remark? Just curious. ;D --YeOldeGentleman (talk) 19:53, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Cohen's article is the evidence for the claim made, and he is fairly notable. What's wrong with including it? --BobFromBrockley (talk) 17:24, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, I think personal sympathies are my biggest motivation (I'm a Leftist). Well, let's leave it in then, just to be safe and avoid further to-and-fro. Thanks for getting back to me. --YeOldeGentleman (talk) 21:43, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Because Cohen basically wrote a dishonest hit piece (an op-ed), where he blatantly misquoted Johnstone. He has no expertise on the topic at hand, so I fail to see the value of his polemic here. And frankly, as someone who's been a rabid supporter of the Iraq War and a minimizer of the its collossal human impact, he's the last one who should be calling the kettle black. Johnstone may have gotten things wrong, but it does not make every attack on her work right.Guccisamsclub (talk) 21:59, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Furthermore, this is a BLP, so a claim that the LP cooked up fake and ridiculous numbers in order to deny a genocide must be rock-solid and based on equally rock-solid sources. The Cohen cite falls short, to put it mildly. Guccisamsclub (talk) 22:21, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

In fact, plenty of sources online confirm that Johnstone only refers to "199 Serb civilians" [* Corrected.] as being fatalities in Srebrenica. Where does it say in Wikipedia policy that a journalist's work cannot be cited because s/he was badly wrong about the Iraq war? Philip Cross (talk) 06:29, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Have you read the relevant pages in Johnstone's book? She accurately cites 199 as the number unearthed who were forensically identified "blindfolded and bound" by ICTY, i.e. identified as being victims of certain execution. There is no indication that she takes this as the midline estimate of the number killed or executed, which she rightly or wrongly considers to be uncertain and split between Muslims and Serbs, with most victims missing and unidentified. (FWIW I think the research done since makes Johnstone's argument about the numbers much less tenable). But look at how Cohen spins this in his incoherent rant about everyone from Murdoch to Chomky:" "Insofar as Muslims were actually executed" – and Johnstone thought that the Serbs had killed only 199 – "such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of 'genocide'."(emphasis added). This passage is just quote from a book review interspersed with a disingenuous paraphrase by Cohen. In fact, Johnstone has given no estimate of her own, aside from considering 8,000+ to be an exaggeration. It does not matter what Cohen or anyone else claims she wrote. The authority on what Johnstone wrote is Johnstone's own text. Commentaries on Johnstone are relevant insofar as they offer intrepretation and commentary -- the Cohen cite simply puts inflammatory words in her mouth, in a BLP to boot.

And as I've already stated, I do not agree that blogs and Op-Eds are necessarilly reliable sources - they contain all kinds of kinds of opinions from all kinds of people, often -- as in the cases of Cohen and Bloodworth -- people with absolutely no authority on the topic.

Cohen's warmongering was not my main gripe. I was simply expressing exasperation at the fact that, of all people, an outspoken apologist for mass murder was being cited as authority on the politics of "genocide denial".

The bloodworth is quite simply a lighwight source, with no books or sholarly publications of *any kind* to his name. He and other bloggers might have something to say about Labour Party politics, but not on the history of the Balkans or any other part of the world. In a short article such as this, the Bloodworth cite is simply UNDUE. You will note that I left the Hoare and Villamy quotes in place (despite their aggressive POV), because they are notable in the sense that Bloodworth and Cohen are not. As it stands, the article is lopsided enough and easily be renamed "Criticism of Johnstone and the awful things she's said". Citing Bloodworth and Cohen is simply adding fuel to the fire, for NO reason other than to stoke the flames.Guccisamsclub (talk) 11:37, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

BTW, Where did you get "119 Serb civilians" from? It bears no resemblance to the material cited in this article, as far as I can tell. Please provide the citation.Guccisamsclub (talk) 12:01, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

The part about "Serb Civilians" and "only refers to" and as "being fatalities" are also wrong. Johnstone's—or more accurately ICTY's—199 refers to both Serb and Bosnian Muslim casualties (civilian or otherwise), and not just any casualties, but victims of execution, and not just any vicims of execution but those found by the ICTY to be blinfolded or bound at time of death. She's simply citing a source. Elsewhere, whe refers to the total dead as being uncrertain, with most people missing and unidentified. Please let me know what you think, so we can resolve the dipute.Guccisamsclub (talk) 21:03, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Warning: Off-Tangent Gucci, the Iraq war was a tragic mistake, not an act of "mass murder." According to the Iraq Body Count project, roughly 10,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S.-led coalition forces during the entire occupation of Iraq, not counting several thousand more killed during the initial invasion. Almost 90%(!) of documented civilian deaths were at the hands of the insurgents (such as al Qaeda in Iraq/Islamic State). Of those small minority of documented civilian deaths caused by coalition forces, the number who were intentionally murdered could be as low as 1%. Finally, according to Iraqi-British author Kanan Makiya, "You —i.e. the U.S.—didn't wreck Iraq a fraction as much as we—i.e. Iraqis—did. The looting, for instance, destroyed orders of magnitude more infrastructure than the war ever did" and "The U.S. has not committed atrocities in Iraq that are even remotely comparable to what Saddam did." Certainly, the true number of violent and excess deaths may be impossible to estimate, but if Saddam's regime had collapsed on its own, it is highly unlikely the end result would have been any more benign.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 03:34, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

In Crawford, p 11, you'll note that in the graph for 2003-2008, the overwhelming majority of documented civian deaths were caused by "unknown". You can fall back on the ancient principle of blaming "them" not "us", but you shouldn't expect such an assertion to be taken seriously. The argument that coalition forces "intentionally killed" only a few dozen civilians stikes me as methodologically and morally beyond the pale. Most victims of atrocities throughout history have been collateral damage from the point of view of the perpetrators, especially those at the very top. Ignoring for a moment Makyia's assertion that Saddam's was immune to revolution or collapse, the argument that it would have happened anyway is also extremely slippery. Responsibility can only be assigned for what actually happened, not for what might have happened, which is of course another common excuse used by mass-murderers. And from the point of view of end goals (i.e. the moral and political point of view), a genuine revolution against a vicious regime is something quite different from a neo-colonial war of aggression, despite the fact that both would involve chaos and violence. The former is usually defensible, especially since the alternative usually means supporting the reactionary violence of a moth-eaten dictatorship (which the US was always quite fond of doing, despite its r-revolutionary excuses for the Iraq war) Guccisamsclub (talk) 11:09, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Continued on Gucci's talk page to avoid further derailing of this discussion.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:20, 18 June 2016 (UTC)